More airbrush

I bought some airbrush things.

I bought two things of airbrush-specific paint, and a large thing of airbrush medium. Reading a bit today, I discovered that the problem I was having (which you probably couldn’t see in the last photo) was because of the surface tension of the water I used to thin my paint with. Droplets are formed when there is to much water. I could add less water…or solve the problem by throwing more tools at it. 🙂

I did a bunch of tests tonight, which again, the camera does not properly show. >.<

The airbrush blue is very striking! You can see some “basic highlighting” here, but I think that’s just because I’m painting over top of my previous test paint jobs which had dried with some darker sections and some lighter sections because of the water content and how the pigment moved around with it. The right two look green…but I feel like I should take new photos because I’m looking at them on my desk here, and they are definitely blue – damn white balance!

Something that was nice about the airbrush thinner was that it came out of the pot in small droplets so you can control how much goes into the airbrush. Also, there were no tiny droplet puddles formed on the models, so I call that a success.

The second part of my model test was to apply some green, this failed quite a bit. I have an older Scaly Green and it was dry. I tried to liven it up with some of the Golden Matte Medium, plus the Airbrush Thinner, but it doesn’t look like it did anything – on the camera or in real life. My second test was to use the Airbrush Paint Green…which has the word “transparent” at the top of the bottle. >.> Not…intentional. I applied this several times to the bright blue model, but it kept pooling in the recesses (bad) so I kept wiping it off with a paper towel. Didn’t notice it said transparent until I looked at these photos now…whoops.

Having said that, I’m liking how the GW paints are turning out, I just need a modern colour that isn’t dried up! The airbrush paint really is that shiny! At least with the GW or P3 with the airbrush thinner it comes out semi-gloss, much easier to fix with a dullcoat layer at the end.

The next thing to figure out, is now that I’ve got my colours and such, how do I plan on highlighting? With the ork plane, I could just mix in more bright blue and it highlighted very nicely. This is a much smaller application, with fewer sharp edges. I could try the same, or I could accept that the airbrush is applying a base coat and shade with a brush from there. If I’m using GW paints, this is also a bit easier since I can use my techniques as normal.